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It had become one of the messiest crises of his bombastic and colourful career as a hockey executive, and the worst since arriving as saviour of the Maple Leafs more than three years ago.

It only made sense president/GM Brian Burke would turn in desperation to one he won with before to help him out of an awkward jam.

So Randy Carlyle received the nod on Friday night to take over the plummeting Leafs with only 18 games left in the regular season, a stunning reversal of events given that Burke had vowed repeatedly in print, over the airwaves and on social media to stand by beleaguered head coach Ron Wilson after giving him a contract extension in December.

The late season firing carried out in Montreal was the most dramatic dismissal of a Leaf coach since the late Pat Burns was canned on the plane ride home from Denver 16 years ago and left a chalkboard message for his players before bolting town.

Wilson, forced to listen to rowdy chants of “FI-RE WIL-SON!” at the last Leaf home game, was permitted to run the club through practice Friday morning in Montreal while Burke negotiated with Anaheim for the right to talk to the 55-year-old Carlyle, fired by the Ducks this year.

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Only later in the day was Wilson informed he had become the eighth NHL coach axed this season. He coached 310 games with the Leafs, winning only 130 and failing to make the playoffs every year.

“This was not an easy decision for me to make,” said Burke in a statement. “I want to thank Ron for all of his hard work and dedication to our organization over the past four seasons.”

Carlyle, the 28th head coach in team history and a former Leaf player, arrived in Montreal Friday evening with a superb coaching resume in hand and will coach the 12th-place Leafs against the Canadiens on Saturday with the club having lost 10 of its last 11 games.

While Burke and Wilson were old friends and college roommates, Burke and Carlyle won the Stanley Cup as the GM/coach combination in Anaheim back in 2007, making it logical Burke would turn to Carlyle now.

The right choice? We shall see. The new coach’s first job will be to try and use the games remaining in this season to vault the Leafs into a playoff spot for the first time since 2004, with the club currently five points out of an Eastern Conference post-season berth.

The good news is the team is healthy. The bad news is that the goaltending is porous, the young players dispirited and the club’s vaunted offensive attack has gone silent. Even trickier for Carlyle, in Toronto he will be reunited with winger Joffrey Lupul, currently the NHL’s sixth-highest scorer, but a player who had serious disagreements with Carlyle in Anaheim before being traded to the Leafs last winter.

In hiring Carlyle, a teammate of Wilson’s with the 1977-78 Leafs, Burke bypassed the more youthful Dallas Eakins, the promising coach of the first-place AHL Marlies. Burke also chose not to go with an interim coach, but to sign Carlyle to a three-year contract.

Carlyle, considered a hardnosed taskmaster, coached six full seasons in Anaheim, which was his first NHL coaching job, and part of a seventh. He missed the playoffs only once and was instrumental in developing players like Ryan Getzlaf and Corey Perry into NHL stars.

The Ducks finished fourth in the Western Conference last season under Carlyle before losing in the first round to Nashville.

He was fired by the Ducks this season when the club stumbled out of the gate, causing Burke to take to Twitter on Dec. 1 and remark, “Sad to hear about Randy Carlyle. But our coach (Wilson) isn’t going anywhere!”

In late December, Wilson then thumbed his nose at the local media — and embarrassed the once-proud organization — by announcing his own contract extension on Twitter. The one-year extension will cost the Leafs an estimated $2 million (U.S.).

Burke, facing a change in the ownership of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment this summer, continued to defend his embattled coach, insisting that it was the media’s dislike of Wilson’s caustic ways that made him unpopular, not his losing record.

Finally, after a home-ice loss to Florida on Tuesday followed 24 hours later by another setback in Chicago, Burke had little choice. He went silent, declining all comment, until emerging Friday night in Montreal and issuing the statement confirming Wilson’s dismissal and the hiring of Carlyle.

Carlyle was drafted by the Leafs in 1976 and then traded to Pittsburgh two years later along with centre George Ferguson for defenceman Dave Burrows in what would become one of the worst trades in Leaf history. Carlyle starred in Pittsburgh and won the Norris Trophy as the NHL’s top defenceman just three years after being traded by the Leafs.

Carlyle turned to coaching in 1995 and has never had a losing record as a head coach in a full season as a pro coach, including both the AHL and NHL.

That’s impressive. Now, he’ll have to be part magician to turn this Leaf team around and get it into the playoffs.

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